Bernadette Mayer's List of Journal Ideas:
Journals of:
* dreams
* food
* finances
* writing ideas
* love
* ideas for architects
* city design ideas
* beautiful and/or ugly sights
* a history of one's own writing life, written daily
* reading/music/art, etc. encountered each day
* rooms
* elaborations on weather
* people one sees-description
* subway, bus, car or other trips (e.g., the same bus trip written about
every day)
* pleasures and/or pain
* life's everyday machinery: phones, stoves, computers, etc.
* answering machine messages
* round or rectangular things, other shapes
* color
* light
* daily changes, e.g., a journal of one's desk, table, etc.
* the body and its parts
* clocks/time-keeping
* tenant-landlord situations
* telephone calls (taped?)
* skies
* dangers
* mail
* sounds
* coincidences & connections
* times of solitude
Other journal ideas:
* Write once a day in minute detail about one thing
* Write every day at the same time, e.g. lunch poems, waking ideas, etc.
* Write minimally: one line or sentence per day
* Create a collaborative journal: musical notation and poetry; two writers
alternating days; two writing about the same subject each day, etc.
* Instead of using a book, write on paper and put it up on the wall (public
journal).
* and so on ...
Bernadette Mayer's Writing Experiments* Pick a word or phrase at random, let mind play freely around it until a
few ideas have come up, then seize on one and begin to write. Try this with
a non- connotative word, like "so" etc.
* Systematically eliminate the use of certain kinds of words or phrases from
a piece of writing: eliminate all adjectives from a poem of your own, or
take out all words beginning with 's' in Shakespeare's sonnets.
* Rewrite someone else's writing. Experiment with theft and plagiarism.
* Systematically derange the language: write a work consisting only of
prepositional phrases, or, add a gerund to every line of an already existing
work.
* Get a group of words, either randomly selected or thought up, then form
these words (only) into a piece of writing-whatever the words allow. Let
them demand their own form, or, use some words in a predetermined way.
Design words.
* Eliminate material systematically from a piece of your own writing until
it is "ultimately" reduced, or, read or write it backwards, line by line or
word by word. Read a novel backwards.
* Using phrases relating to one subject or idea, write about another,
pushing metaphor and simile as far as you can. For example, use science
terms to write about childhood or philosophic language to describe a shirt.
* Take an idea, anything that interests you, or an object, then spend a few
days looking and noticing, perhaps making notes on what comes up about that
idea, or, try to create a situation or surrounding where everything that
happens is in relation.
* Construct a poem as if the words were three-dimensional objects to be
handled in space. Print them on large cards or bricks if necessary.
* Write as you think, as close as you can come to this, that is, put pen to
paper and don't stop. Experiment writing fast and writing slow.
* Attempt tape recorder work, that is, recording without a text, perhaps at
specific times.
* Make notes on what happens or occurs to you for a limited amount of time,
then make something of it in writing.
* Get someone to write for you, pretending they are you.
* Write in a strict form, or, transform prose into a poetic form.
* Write a poem that reflects another poem, as in a mirror.
* Read or write a story or myth, then put it aside and, trying to remember
it, write it five or ten times at intervals from memory. Or, make a work out
of continuously saying, in a column or list, one sentence or line, over and
over in different ways, until you get it "right."
* Make a pattern of repetitions.
* Take an already written work of your own and insert, at random or by
choice, a paragraph or section from, for example, a psychology book or a
seed catalogue. Then study the possibilities of rearranging this work or
rewriting the "source."
* Experiment with writing in every person and tense every day.
* Explore the possibilities of lists, puzzles, riddles, dictionaries,
almanacs, etc. Consult the thesaurus where categories for the word "word"
include: word as news, word as message, word as information, word as story,
word as order or command, word as vocable, word as instruction, promise,
vow, contract.
* Write what cannot be written; for example, compose an index.
* The possibilities of synesthesia in relation to language and words: the
word and the letter as sensations, colors evoked by letters, sensations
caused by the sound of a word as apart from its meaning, etc. And the effect
of this phenomenon on you; for example, write in the water, on a moving
vehicle.
* Attempt writing in a state of mind that seems least congenial.
* Consider word and letter as forms-the concretistic distortion of a text, a
mutiplicity of o's or ea's, or a pleasing visual arrangement: "the mill pond
of chill doubt."
* Do experiments with sensory memory: record all sense images that remain
from breakfast, study which senses engage you, escape you.
* Write, taking off from visual projections, whether mental or mechanical,
without thought to the word in the ordinary sense, no craft.
* Make writing experiments over a long period of time. For example, plan how
much you will write for a particular work each day, perhaps one word or one
page.
* Write on a piece of paper where something is already printed or written.
* Attempt to eliminate all connotation from a piece of writing and vice
versa.
* Experiment with writing in a group, collaborative work: a group writing
individually off of each other's work over a long period of time in the same
room; a group contributing to the same work, sentence by sentence or line by
line; one writer being fed information and ideas while the other writes;
writing, leaving instructions for another writer to fill in what you can't
describe; compiling a book or work structured by your own language around
the writings of others; or a group working and writing off of each other's
dream writing.
* Dream work: record dreams daily, experiment with translation or
transcription of dream thought, attempt to approach the tense and
incongruity appropriate to the dream, work with the dream until a poem or
song emerges from it, use the dream as an alert form of the mind's activity
or consciousness, consider the dream a problem-solving device, change dream
characters into fictional characters, accept dream's language as a gift.
* Structure a poem or prose writing according to city streets, miles, walks,
drives. For example: Take a fourteen-block walk, writing one line per block
to create a sonnet; choose a city street familiar to you, walk it, make
notes and use them to create a work; take a long walk with a group of
writers, observe, make notes and create works, then compare them; take a
long walk or drive-write one line or sentence per mile. Variations on this.
* The uses of journals. Keep a journal that is restricted to one set of
ideas, for instance, a food or dream journal, a journal that is only written
in when it is raining, a journal of ideas about writing, a weather journal.
Remember that journals do not have to involve "good" writing-they are to be
made use of. Simple one-line entries like "No snow today" can be inspiring
later. Have 3 or 4 journals going at once, each with a different purpose.
Create a journal that is meant to be shared and commented on by another
writer--leave half of each page blank for the comments of the other.
* Type out a Shakespeare sonnet or other poem you would like to learn
about/imitate double-spaced on a page. Rewrite it in between the lines.
* Find the poems you think are the worst poems ever written, either by your
own self or other poets. Study them, then write a bad poem.
* Choose a subject you would like to write "about." Then attempt to write a
piece that absolutely avoids any relationship to that subject. Get someone
to grade you.
* Write a series of titles for as yet unwritten poems or proses.
* Work with a number of objects, moving them around on a field or
surface-describe their shifting relationships, resonances, associations. Or,
write a series of poems that have only to do with what you see in the place
where you most often write. Or, write a poem in each room of your house or
apartment. Experiment with doing this in the home you grew up in, if
possible.
* Write a bestiary (a poem about real and mythical animals).
* Write five short expressions of the most adamant anger; make a work out of
them.
* Write a work gazing into a mirror without using the pronoun I.
* A shocking experiment: Rip pages out of books at random (I guess you could
xerox them) and study them as if they were a collection of poetic/literary
material. Use this method on your old high school or college notebooks, if
possible, then create an epistemological work based on the randomly chosen
notebook pages.
* Meditate on a word, sound or list of ideas before beginning to write.
* Take a book of poetry you love and make a list, going through it poem by
poem, of the experiments, innovations, methods, intentions, etc. involved in
the creation of the works in the book.
* Write what is secret. Then write what is shared. Experiment with writing
each in two different ways: veiled language, direct language.
* Write a soothing novel in twelve short paragraphs.
* Write a work that attempts to include the names of all the physical
contents of the terrestrial world that you know.
* Take a piece of prose writing and turn it into poetic lines. Then, without
remembering that you were planning to do this, make a poem of the first and
last words of each line to see what happens. For instance, the lines (from
Einstein)
* When at the reception
* Of sense-impressions, memory pictures
* Emerge this is not yet thinking
* And when. . .
* Would become:
* When reception
* Of pictures
* Emerge thinking
* And when
* And so on. Form the original prose, poetic lines, and first-and-last word
poem into three columns on a page. Study their relationships.
* If you have an answering machine, record all messages received for one
month, then turn them into a best-selling novella.
* Write a macaronic poem (making use of as many languages as you are
conversant with).
* Attempt to speak for a day only in questions; write only in questions.
* Attempt to become in a state where the mind is flooded with ideas; attempt
to keep as many thoughts in mind simultaneously as possible. Then write
without looking at the page, typescript or computer screen (This is "called"
invisible writing).
* Choose a period of time, perhaps five or nine months. Every day, write a
letter that will never be sent to a person who does or does not exist, or to
a number of people who do or do not exist. Create a title for each letter
and don't send them. Pile them up as a book.
* Etymological work. Experiment with investigating the etymologies of all
words that interest you, including your own name(s). Approaches to
etymologies: Take a work you've already written, preferably something short,
look up the etymological meanings of every word in that work including words
like "the" and "a". Study the histories of the words used, then rewrite the
work on the basis of the etymological information found out. Another
approach: Build poems and writings form the etymological families based on
the Indo-European language constructs, for instance, the BHEL family: bulge,
bowl, belly, boulder, billow, ball, balloon; or the OINO family: one, alone,
lonely, unique, unite, unison, union; not to speak of one of the GEN
families: kin, king, kindergarten, genteel, gender, generous, genius,
genital, gingerly, pregnant, cognate, renaissance, and innate!
* Write a brief bibliography of the science and philosophy texts that
interest you. Create a file of newspaper articles that seem to relate to the
chances of writing poetry.
* Write the poem: Ways of Making Love. List them.
* Diagram a sentence in the old-fashioned way. If you don't know how, I'll
be happy to show you; if you do know how, try a really long sentence, for
instance from Melville.
* Turn a list of the objects that have something to do with a person who has
died into a poem or poem form, in homage to that person.
* Write the same poem over and over again, in different forms, until you are
weary. Another experiment: Set yourself the task of writing for four hours
at a time, perhaps once, twice or seven times a week. Don't stop until
hunger and/or fatigue take over. At the very least, always set aside a
four-hour period once a month in which to write. This is always possible and
will result in one book of poems or prose writing for each year. Then we
begin to know something.
* Attempt as a writer to win the Nobel Prize in Science by finding out how
thought becomes language, or does not.
* Take a traditional text like the pledge of allegiance to the flag. For
every noun, replace it with one that is seventh or ninth down from the
original one in the dictionary. For instance, the word "honesty" would be
replaced by "honey dew melon." Investigate what happens; different
dictionaries will produce different results.
* Attempt to write a poem or series of poems that will change the world.
Does everything written or dreamed of do this?
* Write occasional poems for weddings, for rivers, for birthdays, for other
poets' beauty, for movie stars maybe, for the anniversaries of all kinds of
loving meetings, for births, for moments of knowledge, for deaths. Writing
for the "occasion" is part of our purpose as poets in being-this is our work
in the community wherein we belong and work as speakers for others.
* Experiment with every traditional form, so as to know it.
* Write poems and proses in which you set yourself the task of using
particular words, chosen at random like the spelling exercises of children:
intelligence, amazing, weigh, weight, camel, camel's, foresight, through,
threw, never, now, snow, rein, rain. Make a story of that!
* Plan, structure, and write a long work. Consider what is the work now
needed by the culture to cure and exact even if by accident the great
exorcism of its 1998 sort-of- seeming-not-being. What do we need? What is
the poem of the future?
* What is communicable now? What more is communicable?
* Compose a list of familiar phrases, or phrases that have stayed in your
mind for a long time--from songs, from poems, from conversation:
* What's in a name? That which we call a rose
* By any other name would smell as sweet
* (Romeo and Juliet)
* A rose is a rose is a rose
* (Gertrude Stein)
* A raisin in the sun
* (Langston Hughes)
* The king was in the counting house
* Counting out his money. . .
* (Nursery rhyme)
* I sing the body electric. . .
* These United States. . .
* (Walt Whitman)
* A thing of beauty is a joy forever
* (Keats)
* (I summon up) remembrance of things past
* (WS)
* Ask not for whom the bell tolls
* It tolls for thee
* (Donne)
* Look homeward, Angel
* (Milton)
* For fools rush in where angels fear to tread
* (Pope)
* All's well that ends well
* (WS)
* I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness
* (Allen Ginsberg)
* I think therefore I am
* (Descartes)
* It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,. . .
* (Dickens)
* brave new world has such people in it
* (Shakespeare, The Tempest, later Huxley)
* Odi et amo (I hate and I love)
* (Catullus)
* Water water everywhere
* Nor any drop to drink
* (Coleridge)
* Curiouser and curiouser
* (Alice in Wonderland)
* Don't worry be happy. Here's a little song I wrote. . .
* Write the longest most beautiful sentence you can imagine-make it be a
whole page.
* Set yourself the task of writing in a way you've never written before, no
matter who you are.
* What is the value of autobiography?
* Attempt to write in a way that's never been written before.
* Invent a new form.
* Write a perfect poem.
* Write a work that intersperses love with landlords.
* In a poem, list what you know.
* Address the poem to the reader.
* Write household poems-about cooking, shopping, eating and sleeping.
* Write dream collabortations in the lune form.
* Write poems that only make use of the words included in Basic English.
* Attempt to write about jobs and how they affect the writing of poetry.
* Write while being read to from science texts, or, write while being read
to by one's lover from any text.
* Trade poems with others and do not consider them your own.
* Exercises in style: Write twenty-five or more different versions of one
event.
* Review the statement: "What is happening to me, allowing for lies and
exaggerations which I try to avoid, goes into my poems."

I have multiple novels in various stages. Sometimes I have a basic idea, but not enough for characters or plot. I always write these down anyways. If I’m bored, I’ll pull up my idea file and see if any of the bits and pieces will work together.

I want to share with you the notes and evolution of how my current project came together. All these notes came at completely different times and from unrelated places.

ideas (Photo credit: Sean MacEntee)

Idea 1

Someone who lives to their beliefs. Mental expectation defines our reality. Refusing to belief that flight is impossible. A person lives by their own set of rules. What others see as tricks and magic is reality for this person. Anything is possible if you believe.

Idea 2

two best friends from childhood, begin to grow apart. the guy stops writing. she continues, unaware that he is throwing her letters away without reading them. The guys roommate gets curious and opens them. he falls for her through the letters. when she writes about interest in a guy, he gets jealous, has to meet her.

Idea 3

Story about the Crazy Lady:

They call me crazy. I’m not crazy. Just different. I’m happy. I can’t help expressing it. They don’t understand me, because they have not experienced my happiness.

Story

It wasn’t until later that I came back to this notes and realized they could all be combined into one story. Each alone is only a concept, a character, a setting. But combined together we can begin to see a STORY. Suddenly I had three characters: a “crazy” woman who believes in magic and writes letters to her old friend, and the roommate who intercepts these letters.

I still wasn’t ready to write the story. It needed rules, conflict. But the combined ideas gave it a shape, popped it out of 2D and into 3D. So that’s my advice for today. Always write down your ideas, no matter how small. And if you cut a character from a story, or a line from a poem, save that as well. You never know where it might find a fit later.

If you don’t have anything in your idea file, or can’t find a way to make any of your ideas fit for a story, don’t be afraid to use prompts. There are plenty of prompt generators online. Feel free to use different ones, mix and match. Get a character here, a setting there. The more ideas you can combine, the more depth your story will have.

Resources

Here are a few places for free writing prompts

Seventh Sanctum: A personal favorite. In addition to story prompts, has a lot of other random generators.

Again this year I participated in Robert Lee Brewer’s November Poem A Day challenge. The poems are supposed to form a chapbook, but I wasn’t aiming for that. I simply wanted to write poetry.

My muse has been in an un-serious mood most of the month. I’ve done a lot of rhyming and a lot of, well …

Here are a couple of poems:Poetic Formless

Dust like stars. Any storm in a port. The eye of my apple. Dust the bite. Blind a turned eye. Fuse a blow. Worm an open can. A death worse than fate. Ice the break. Knot the tie. A society of pillars.

Moons with rock piles made of diamonds, worlds of water where huge ships sail, never reaching shore, jungles full of purple cows, green tigers, and yellow elephants, dragons, fairies two feet tall, ten-foot-tall giants, magic wands, movies that turn themselves on with a blink of an eye.

My car sprouts helicopter wings. I look down on the cars lined up on route 95 as it winds through downtown Providence, and I open my mouth and sing, loudly, beautifully on pitch, remembering all the words.

The Truth about Truth

I desire a Truth
in my Christmas stocking.
Instead, in my head,
I hear a voice mocking.

“Truth’s much too fat
to be hung from a ledge
above a hot fire.”
Alas, though I pledge

she’ll never get burned,
she just shakes her large head.
Perhaps I will dream her
tonight in my bed.

She’ll plop on my blanket,
speak low in my ear.
I hope I’ll be able
to shut up and hear.

When He’s Gone

Alas, my laptop, Joe, is dead.
He tripped and fell right on his head.
The light went off. I almost cried,
the night my laptop, Joseph, died.

I had another laptop, Lou.
Unfortunately, he’s finished, too.
I spilled some coffee on his head,
and now my laptop, Lou, is dead.

Alas, I fear I’ll be offline
until November 12 at nine
AM when I return to work,
and leap onto my desktop, Kirk.

So for a time, I bid adieu
while I consider what to do:
to buy another or repair
or find someone who has a spare.

It was only a couple days before the month began that I decided to participate in National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) this year. I was already planning on doing November Poem-A-Day (Nov PAD). With two projects going on, I knew I’d have to prioritize one of them.

Since the novel will take up more words and hours, that took top spot. This also kept me from stressing over the poetry prompts. In previous years, I’ve struggled getting a decent poem written off prompts. It’s a very finicky process. I’m way more reliant on my Muse to cooperate for poetry than fiction. In fiction, I can push forward and just write. That doesn’t work for poetry! At least not for me.

So Day 1, I read the poetry prompt early. No ideas come to mind, so I shrug and allow myself to focus on my novel. I worried that since I wasn’t coming up with even an idea, or giving time to it, that the poems would be a bust again this year.

But that prompt was still in the back of my head, doing its work. Turns out I need to have more faith in my Muse/subconscious. For first thing the next morning, when I was trying to get more sleep, there was that prompt, and accompanied with how I was going to use it. I even had a repetitious phrase!

Lesson learned: For the poetry, read the prompts but don’t stress it. Let it simmer, sit in the back of my brain while I do other stuff. When it’s ready, I won’t be able to ignore it.

Today I’m going to share with you my favorite tool for dealing with writers block.

You may already be familiar with Morning Pages. This started with Julia Cameron, creator of The Artist’s Way. “Morning Pages are three pages of longhand writing, strictly stream-of-consciousness.” The idea is to, first thing in the morning, get out a notebook and write three pages of whatever is in your head. No overthinking. This clears your head for the rest of the day, opening you to inspiration, happiness, opportunity.

My problems with this system? I don’t function first thing in the morning. And I’ve been burned before by someone finding and reading stream-of-consciousness pages, and I don’t have a convenient place to keep these close and yet secret.

The solution? 750words.com. This takes the same concept online. It’s easier to sit down at your computer than find a pen or pencil and write by hand. (At least for some of us.)

The site is completely private. No one will be reading your words, you can do them at any time in the day, and there are incentives! Streaks and different statistics can earn animal badges. Amazing how motivating it is to get them. There are also monthly challenges to write daily for a special badge and bragging rights. A point system keeps track of how many days you’ve started and completed your 750 words. Sometimes it’s an incentive, especially if I have a streak going that I don’t want to break. But I never get reprimanded if I go too long without visiting.

My first month was brutal. My brain wanted to edit my words, censor, plan. I had a hard time simply opening my consciousness and writing whatever. Now, even if I’ve gone a month without writing anything, it’s so easy to get back into.

Since starting on the site (just over a year now!), my thoughts are clearer, my ideas more frequent, I’m less bogged by negativity. Even my typing speed has gone up with all the speed typing to keep up with my thoughts. I spend less time worrying about issues, which frees my subconscious to other ideas. I wish I was more consistent in using the site, as I know the results are positive.

Some people use the site for their regular creative writing. Some use it as a serious journal. Others following the guidelines of Morning Pages. Whatever purpose you want. This is completely for you alone. No one else. The site is completely free, so no reason not to give it a try.

The end of the year is a fantastic time to evaluate one’s writing life with an eye to the future. It’s a time to look at the big picture and see if you have met, exceeded, or fallen short of your self-created writing goals for the year. This self-evaluation was inspired by the About.com Graduate School post, Check in With Yourself: End of Semester Self-Evaluation. I’ve found that doing a regular self-evaluation is a great tool for reflection on my graduate school experiences. This evaluation is not an excuse for you to beat yourself up; instead it will allow you to get a clearer picture of your writing life.

Consider your responses to these questions. It might help to actually write them down. 🙂

If I could do anything over, what would I choose? What would I do differently?

What are my writing strengths and witnesses?

How might I address these weaknesses?

How can I augment these strengths?

What have I learned this year? About writing? About subjects of interest to me? Personally?

After thoughtful consideration, what can you conclude about your year? What will you do differently next year?

Some ideas to think about for 2012:

Set aside regular times to write. Be flexible. If you are a morning person write in the mornings, if not, write in the afternoons or evenings. Consider investing in writing prompt books or get writing prompts off the internet, so you are not stuck for ideas. Remember, writers write!

Consider collaborating on a writing project with a writing friend or online critique group. Collaborating is a great way to support one another while holding each other accountable.

Take time at the end of 2011 or the beginning of 2012 to revisit your writing goals. Are they too ambitious or not ambitious enough? Can you break your goals down into smaller, more manageable steps? If you haven’t made any writing goals, is it time to do so? Think about sharing your writing goals with supportive family members and friends. Do you have any deadlines looming? Make a note of those and give yourself time to meet them.

Reflect on any Works in Progress (WIPs) you have. Is it time to let your WIPs go or is it time to breathe new life into a WIP?

Every year is a new beginning. A new year is a great time to establish good writing habits and to reflect on the past year. It’s also a good time to congratulate yourself on what you accomplished in 2011 and realize what you did right. See you in 2012!

We all know the adage, “Don’t sweat the small stuff”, right? Do you know it applies just as easily to writing and poetry as it does to the other important things in life?

For example, I hear people asking me “Where do you get your ideas from?” and the answer to that is “Everywhere!”

It might be in a snatch of conversation I overheard at the restaurant while we’re waiting in line. It might be in the three headlines from today’s paper that I linked together to form a writing prompt. Perhaps that interesting documentary I watched on Discovery last night at 2 AM sparked some poem or plot ideas. It might even be in a dramatically stormy day with lightning crashing all around me.

I mean, open your eyes and ears, folks, along with your other senses. A lingering fragrance on the breeze, the tang of Thai spices on your taste buds, the feel of your lover’s caress. Anything in your world, good or bad, can serve as inspiration.

So how do you go about capturing these things for later use?

There are things you probably have in your possession already that can do that. Your cell phone can take a photo or record a voice memo or send an email to yourself, a thin notebook in your purse or back pocket to record ideas, and a notebook, pen and flashlight on your night stand to record those flashes of ideas that come when we are least prepared. I keep a file of writing prompts from various sources on my computer. I have a folder of photographs that serve the same purpose. There are many books of writing prompts, tools like Story Spinner, and writing games that can give you a heaping serving of inspiration. Let’s not forget the classic fridge word magnets either.

So don’t worry that you won’t have any ideas. All you have to do is just open your mind and it will be filled with amazing information, without even breaking a sweat.